CROYDON COMMENTARY: A council briefing document shows that officials and the Mayor are playing fast and loose with their legal obligations on provision for the homeless, says KEN TOWL
Access Croydon: we’re all just two pay packets away from being forced to live on the streets, depending on Croydon Council for help
Croydon Council is playing fast and loose with their obligations on temporary and emergency housing provision, and thereby increasing costs to the public purse and compounding the suffering of already desperate residents of the borough.
The council’s Homelessness Strategy and Delivery Plan 2024-2029 sets out a plan to deal with homelessness in the borough that will prove both costly and cruel.
Most of us will never have to face homelessness but, on the other hand, most of us are just two pay packets away from being forced to live on the streets.
Imagine how your life might start to fall apart. Prices go up, a relationship breaks down, you lose your job, or you keep your job but it doesn’t pay enough and the rent goes up and, if you can’t pay, your landlord can issue a no-fault eviction to find someone who can.
You don’t have to be feckless to end up homeless. This is what years of austerity do to a society.
Let’s say this happens to you in Croydon. Where do you and your children turn for help?
To the statutory safety net that is the council, of course, the council that, back in a July 2017 press release boasted that its successful negotiation of extended leases on “338 units” in Concord House, Sycamore House and Windsor House on London Road, “guarantees Croydon Council a supply of quality accommodation for homeless people over the next 40 years”.
The council’s own internal report from May 2017 is quite cocky about just how well Croydon Council was dealing with homelessness. Of the lease extensions, it claims: “This means that, whatever happens to homelessness demand over the next 40 years, the 338 units secured under these proposals will form the bedrock of the overall supply mix.”
Fast forward seven years to the present and it has not quite worked out that way.
Everything is worse than anyone at Croydon Council imagined. If you need temporary or emergency accommodation, you are most likely to end up in a B&B (and don’t expect any breakfast!) and you may find your family split up across the borough because no suitable family-sized accommodation is available.
As Inside Croydon reported earlier this week, figures from the council suggest that more than 80% of placements are into expensive, unsuitable B&B accommodation, with families being split up, trauma on top of trauma.
Official figures: the chart from the council briefing document that shows 206 ‘split’ families in temporary accommodation, with one family housed in such a manner since 2012
And this is becoming the experience of ever more people. The law, in the form of The Homelessness (Suitability of Accommodation) Order 2003, stipulates that families with children cannot be made to live in B&B accommodation (that is, with shared toilet, washing and cooking facilities) for more than six weeks. That time limit is routinely broken, and there is nothing to stop local authorities from splitting families up. This is reminiscent of the workhouse of Dickensian England.
The opposition Labour group on the council has proposed doing away with the cruelty of splitting homeless families up, or at least severely limiting it so “that placements by the council into split accommodation will be rare and brief, and will not exceed a period of 14 nights”.
But Mayor Jason Perry seems to be intent on avoiding this commitment and making do with “the aspiration to end the splitting of households” and that meanwhile “the council may split households in two or more units of accommodation, taking into account any welfare concerns and for a reasonably short period of time”.
Mahatma Gandhi said that you should judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members. There’s something in that.
I reckon you can also judge a political class by the euphemistic language and neutral tone they use to create reports that contain sentences like this: “The Placements Policy is an operational delivery tool that helps the council to prioritise temporary accommodation provision and reduce the risk of legal challenge relating to such decisions.”
It is good to know that the council has our best interests at heart.
Read more: More than 200 families split up by council’s housing department
Read more: ‘My family’s hell on earth’: 18 months in a Croydon B&B
Read more: Croydon’s B&B nightmare: ‘an indictment of modern Britain’
Ken Towl, pictured right, is a regular contributor to Inside Croydon, writing on a range of subjects from arts to social policy, to education to plastic giraffes…
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First, thanks to Ken for writing this article and highlighting this issue. Homeless people are often ignored by the system and face abuse from the public but it’s important to remember that being homeless is not someone’s fault and lots of us could so easily become homeless ourselves.
As someone who was homeless for periods during my teens and early twenties, I have some experience of how it feels and the long-term impacts it can have on your life. What has always seemed obvious when I look at how officials deal with homeless people is that most of them have no experience of what it is like, and they have made no attempt to find out before they design their processes and procedures.
When politicians discuss the housing crisis, the focus is nearly always on building more properties and the ‘cost’ of providing housing. It ignores the impact on people, on society, on our children’s futures, and there is an absolute reluctance to accept that having somewhere to live should be a basic human right.
While Councils and Governments treat property as assets and talk about costs and legal obligations, we will never get to the root of the problem. We need to refocus on our moral obligations to ensure everyone has somewhere safe to live, Just think of the positives that would bring to individuals and society as a whole if we removed the fear and the reality of being homeless.
And there was me thinking that the placements policy was all about finding people experiencing homelessness suitable, stable and long-term accommodation. Silly me! slaps wrist. It is actually a tool to minimize the possibility of successful legal action against the council.
And the thing that takes the biscuit? There are empty properties suitable for families across the borough standing empty whilst their owners attempt to get planning permission to split them into flats. Flats? Given the number of flats being built, we don’t need more of them, we need family homes.